Caroline
I wake up wearing Afon's flannel shirt. It still dwarfs me in every way, but at this point, my own clothes are crusty enough that they could walk to the laundromat by themselves, so at least I don't have to smell myself when I have this woodsmoke-and-cologne-scented tunic layered on top of everything.
The bed is empty on his side. That doesn't surprise me—some people are snoozers, and some people are Everyone you know and love will die horribly, Final Destination style, if you don't get out of bed the second you regain consciousness every day.
I'm the former; Afon is, like, the mayor of the latter.
But this time, he hasn't gone far. I can hear him moving around the hut, the scrape of the cast-iron pan, the metallic complaint of the stove door, and Wolf's toenails clicking after him like a furry shadow with separation anxiety.
I sit up. My ankle gives a perfunctory throb, more out of habit than conviction. When I pat my hair, it feels like it's made out of concrete. The concept of "shampoo" is just like the memory of a dream I once had.
"Morning," I mumble.
Afon glances over from the stove. His eyes glass over when they see me in his shirt. Then he grunts and turns away.
"There's coffee," he says. "I'll warn you: It's bad."
"You undersell everything. The cabin was 'just a building.' The bullet wound was 'a graze.' I bet the coffee is delicious."
I pour myself a cup and… Yep, it's bad. Awful, really. I've never wanted a matcha latte more.
"Delicious," I declare, and drink the whole thing.
By midmorning I have appointed myself sous-chef, a position that exists in this kitchen like how the position of Lieutenant Governor exists in most states: ceremonially, and against the wishes of the administration.
"You're in my light," Afon grumbles.
"Tough titty; there's nowhere else for me to go.
" I'm perched at the table with his folding knife and a chunk of venison he has, after extensive negotiation, permitted me to cube.
My knife skills need work, though. The venison cubes are more like mushy, uneven little blobs. "Also, I have notes on the menu."
"There is no menu."
"Exactly my point. So glad you agree." I point things out with my knife. "There's venison, and then there's beans, and then there's venison with beans, which you seem to believe constitutes a third dish."
"It does."
"Actually, it does not." I gesture at the shelf with the knife, which makes him reach over without comment and angle my wrist away from my own femoral artery. "Are you, like, some kind of alien who only eats beans? Are you on a bean diet? Do you owe beans a debt and this is how you repay them?"
"Beans keep. They provide protein and calories and they don't spoil." He shakes the pan, as if that proves his point.
"Flavor is important, too, you know! Ask any military historian! Napoleon lost Russia over morale because the food sucked!"
"Napoleon lost Russia over winter," he retorts, "and if he'd had beans, things might've gone differently."
I stare at him. "Did you just defend beans with the Napoleonic Wars?"
"You're the one who brought him up."
"I want it on the record that you're impossible."
"Noted," he says, which is becoming like a little running joke of his.
But even though he's making fun of me, at least a little bit, part of me still feels warm and pleasantly tickled, enough so that I'm smiling as I mangle this innocent deer into rhomboids. He's talking.
Yesterday, he told me about Gervasii and the swallow tattoo and a man named Viktor Reznik whose name made my skin crawl on a cellular level.
And guess what? The sky didn't fall, and Afon didn't walk into the snow and stay there. Instead, he's stayed here. Next to me. He's standing at a stove bantering about legume philosophy, and there's an ease in the set of his shoulders that wasn't there three days ago.
I wouldn't go so far as to call him "relaxed." Afon Satyrin will be "relaxed" in his casket and possibly not even then. But he's… lighter. Like a man who put down one bag out of the fifty he's carrying and was surprised at how good it felt to let go.
I sneak the venison scraps to Wolf when Afon's back is turned. Wolf accepts them happily.
"I can see you in the window reflection," Afon says, not turning around.
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Fine. But if he gets fat, you can carry him down the mountain."
The lifting incident happens around noon.
In my defense, the stove is the only warm object in this entire stone shoebox, and I have spent twenty-eight years as a person whose default body temperature is "office air conditioning victim.
" So when the venison-and-beans (one dish, he insists; two, I maintain; the litigation continues) reaches a critical stage that requires stove access, I find myself standing directly in front of it with my palms out like I'm warming myself over a trash fire in a Dickens novel.
"Move," Afon says.
"Can't. I'm photosynthesizing."
"Caroline."
"There's room," I insist. "You can reach around me. You have arms like a cargo crane."
We square off, scowling at each other. We both know exactly where this is going, because we have been here before, in another kitchen, in another life, when he picked me up off the floor like a misplaced chair and set me on the counter and I sputtered about assault and he told me to sue him.
"Don't you dare," I warn. "Afon, don't you—!"
His hands close around my waist.
Here's what's different. Last time, it was logistics. A man relocating an obstruction. His hands were impersonal as a forklift and he went back to his fishing reel without a flicker, while I sat on that counter feeling like a sack of flour with a law degree.
This time, his hands settle on my waist over his own flannel and they stay there for a beat before he lifts.
This time, when he raises me—effortless, infuriating, the floor just abandoning my feet like we were never that close anyway—he doesn't deposit me at a distance.
He turns and sets me down maybe eighteen inches to the left, on the edge of the table, and his hands don't leap away like they touched a hot pan afterward.
They linger. One thumb is resting just above my hip bone and I can feel its exact circumference through the fabric, like my nervous system has dispatched its entire staff to that one square inch.
"You were in my way," he explains. His voice has dropped into a register that the stove has nothing to do with.
"You could've said excuse me."
"I did. Three days running."
We are not pretending anymore. Last time, we both pretended it was nothing. Now, he's looking down at me, and I'm looking up at him, and the pretense is just gone, dismantled overnight like the Berlin Wall blanket, and neither of us is rebuilding it.
Then the pan hisses, threatening to scorch, and he turns back to the stove. I'm left sitting on the table, breathing hard like I just took the stairs.
Wolf, from his post by the door, yawns enormously.
"Nobody asked you," I scold him.
The phone thing happens in the afternoon, and I almost don't register it as a thing at all.
Afon goes out to check the perimeter and comes back dusted in snow, and because we have somehow become the kind of people who do small domestic services for each other without discussion, I take his jacket while he stomps his boots and turn to hang it on the second hook.
The jacket is heavy. It's always heavy; it's a workman's jacket built for a man who nearly outweighs the mountain we've come to call home.
But as I lift it, the left breast swings against my forearm and there's something in there.
Hard. Rectangular. Substantial—heavier than a wallet, bigger than the folding knife, with a stub of antenna-ish rigidity at one end that my fingers read through the canvas for a second before I get the jacket onto the hook.
A radio? A GPS? One of those chunky outdoorsman gadgets that men of a certain disposition collect like Pokémon?
I open my mouth to ask.
And then I look at him—crouched by the stove, feeding in a log, the firelight doing flattering things to a face that needs no assistance in the good looks department—and I think about the deal.
His way. His order. When he says so. We've come so far since "I haven't ruled out shooting you," but the ice we're standing on is new ice, thin ice, ice that has held only one day's weight so far.
It'd be a bad idea to push.
So I don't ask. I file it away for safe keeping. I put it in the same mental cabinet where I keep the bronze ring he still wears and the woman in the blue sundress, the cabinet labeled THINGS I AM CHOOSING NOT TO DETONATE TODAY, which is, frankly, the most crowded cabinet I own.
It's probably nothing. Probably a fancy compass. Not even worth worrying about.
The collision happens after dinner, and I'd love to tell you who started it, but the honest answer is physics.
It goes like this: I'm clearing the tin plates, he's reaching past me for the kettle, and since the hut is approximately the size of a Manhattan parking space, we miscalculate. My shoulder meets his chest. His hand comes up to steady me and lands at the small of my back.
I look up to deliver a quip—I have one loaded, something about traffic patterns—but it dies somewhere between my brain and my mouth, because his eyes have gone dark and fixed and the air between us has acquired the density of standing water.
"Caroline," he says. It's supposed to be a warning, but it comes out like a confession.
"I didn't do anything," I whisper.
"I know," he says. "That's the problem."
And then his mouth is on mine.
The first kiss, against the stone wall, was an accident of pressure—a thing that escaped him, all that fury with nowhere else to go.
This is not that. This is deliberate. His hand slides from the small of my back and splays between my shoulder blades as he pulls me in like he's been doing math on this maneuver for days.